1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a document reader and a reading processing method therefor to read characters of general documents in English, for example.
2. Description of the Related Art
For the document reader including optical character readers, the position of the character entry area on the document sheet to be read and the processing sequence (reading sequence) for each character entry area are generally determined before reading is executed, like a slip form. These pieces of data used for reading are given to a character reader as format control data (FC). FC data is given by the description showing control contents, which is translated into the format suitable for the recognition equipment to execute recognition processing and used as processing control data. As mentioned above, the document reader to execute processing according to FC data is called the slip reading type because the character entry area and line position on the sheet and the type of characters to be read are specified.
However, unlike the slip-reading-type document reader, an equipment has been developed which is given no reading control data such as FC data, and which executes reading by detecting the character reading area in which characters are recorded and determines the reading sequence. This type of document reader is called the document reading type because it purposes to read general document specifying no reading-area position or line position. For this document-reading-type document reader, it is necessary to accurately detect the character reading area for processing to determine the sequence of reading (reading sequence) for each sheet in order to execute processing for documents consisting of various type of formats.
However, character reading areas not subjected to processing are detected or incorrect reading sequences have been determined at times since documents consisting of various types of formats are read. After the read operation is executed in the above manner, edition should be executed on read results (display of character strings) displayed after the read operation. The edition includes deletion of character strings or change of positions using, for example, a word processor. This results in increase of workload. Therefore, to decrease the workload after character reading, the function has been requested to correct and change the character reading area and reading sequence determined by the equipment.